Our nation’s nannies, scolds and buttinskies started 2013 with a renewed hunger to mind other people’s business.

One Florida city has banned dog tethering (even on your own property!) and a Texas State Rep. Bill Zedler (R-Arlington) wants to license strippers to dissuade women from going into that line of work. But Reason awards 2013’s first Nanny of the Month booby prize to the northwest nag whose new bill, if passed, would expand the drug war by categorizing cigarettes as a Schedule III controlled substance (along with LSD). You’d need a doctor’s prescription to get your mitts on tobacco products (including cigars), and if you disobey, you could be looking at a fine of $6,250, up to a year in prison, or both.

Dixieland jazz bands wail at New Orleans funerals. Green activists are now clamoring to be buried in bio-degradable cardboard coffins. In Taiwan, another unusual funeral rite has become popular — strippers dancing for the dead, and consoling the living, by performing on movable Electric Flower Cars that join funeral processions en route to the graveyard.

This practice originated in rural districts of Taiwan, but has spurred more debate since appearing in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital. Marc L. Moscowitz has now documented the phenomenon in a film called Dancing for the Dead: Funeral Strippers in Taiwan. He interviews academics, journalists, government officials and the strippers themselves to try to make sense of what’s at stake. Here is an excerpt.

How did political conventions get started? How did they begin? Dick Morris relates the story behind the first conventions, and the pivotal role played by Andrew Jackson in persuading the parties to adopt conventions as their chief mechanism for nominating presidential candidates. In the early years of the nation, these candidates were selected by congressional caucuses.

In related news as the Republicans open their 2012 convention in Tampa, Reason.TV’s Kennedy says the delegates should just skip the speeches and go party at Tampa’s renowned strip clubs — thus, showing support for “capitalism at its finest.”